First Article About QNX From 1983? Try to Prove QNX Wrong!

Paul Leroux from QNX went on a hunt into the history of QNX this week on their blog. He was looking for the first magazine article about QNX and he thinks he found it. Back in 1983 InfoWorld wrote an article about QNX v1.0 which is almost 28 years ago. That was back when Windows 1.0 was still vaporware and Windows was released in 1985 just to give you perspective.

QNX was actually called Quantum back them and the QNX OS v1.0 only ran on x86 machines and took up 96kb of memory. Paul points out a highlight from the article saying:

"Geraghty gave InfoWorld a brief demonstration of an experimental QNX user interface designed for the IBM PC. The interface will eventually allow users to grow ‘windows’ on the screen and run separate tasks in each window."

That puts the roots for the BlackBerry PlayBook OS and future BlackBerry smartphones to the dawn of consumer operating systems. Talk about some vision. Paul put out the challenge to see if you can come up with a QNX article from before 1983. It was initially released in 1982 so there is not that much time to look for. Let us know if you spot anything!

The question was whether one could find an article about the QNX operating system that predated the one from 1983. The QNX operating system did not exist until 1982. Yes, Dan and Gord did form QNX prior to the introduction of the QNX operating system, but that isn’t relevant to the question.